Dr Jelena Stojković

Nonaka Yuri’s prolific career spans a period of several decades and encompasses versatile modes of artistic work. She published several books with prominent surrealist writers and worked as a designer on a broad range of publications, claiming a singular position in the crossover between the literary world and visual culture in Japan. Paying particular attention to her collage works, this essay focuses on two collaborative publications that Nonaka produced with Shibusawa Tatsuhiko in the 1960s and ‘70s. It discusses the relationship between text and image in these publications while situating them in a range of relevant contexts – modernist art, the intersection between book design and artistic practice, as well as the work of surrealist women artists.

At 1 p.m. on 6 February 1971, eight “actors,” a reporter, and a cam- eraman entered a space at an undisclosed location with the inten- tion of spending 24 hours together. They did not belong to a single artistic group and some of them had never met before. Tōmatsu Shōmei’s photographic record of this event appeared in the spring 1971 issue of the magazine Kikan shashin eizō accompanied by sections from a transcript of the tape recording. The images and the text – jointly titled NO.541 – offer fragmented glimpses into the situations and conversations unfolding in the room and also function with and against each other, as in a dialogue. We continue this dia- logue in the writing up of major themes contextualizing the performing and recording of this work: the space, the magazine page, and the body. We imagine ourselves in NO.541 and enact this intermingling of space-times by reproducing not only some of Tōmatsu’s photographs but also parts of the transcript in translation. Joining the conversation, we adopt some of the main strategies of the image-text, such as fragmentation, improvisation, and refusal of any singularity. Woman C and Man G take on the role of mediums, channeling, for instance, a possible future re-enactment instead of producing a conclusive account of the event.

This article is a contribution to the section on colour photography that I guest-edited for PhotoResearcher 31 (also including articles by Dr Laure Blanc-Benon and Dr Caroline Fuchs).

The text discusses the intrinsic elusiveness of colour photography vis-à-vis the complex historical baggage of its synthetic nature and in respect of Rainbow’s Gravity (Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, 2014) and A 240 Seconds Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (with Coke, Vinegar and other Tear Gas Remedies) (Basim Magdy, 2012),

Recent practice of staged photography in China renders views of urban landscapes as active elements in performative actions directed for the camera. These cityscapes, featured in photographs produced by artists such as Li Wei, Cao Fei, Chi Peng and Xing Danwen, not only reflect the country's rapid urbanisation but also ongoing processes of globalisation. The same processes reconfigure time–space relations around the globe and offer an opportunity to ‘decentre’ the world, but they equally escape capture and document in real time. Fictional photographic elaborations of their accompanying elements, such as the technologisation of culture and the inability to fix a stable image of the future, provide a point of departure to explore photography's role in response to the challenges posed by global urban living. This issue also creates a space for rethinking the critical potential of the medium.